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Tuesday, November 04, 2003

I am sorry that I am unable to persuade Vivek about the danger of banning of selective aborting of foetuses. This may have something to do with the whole issue of abortion in general. I have come to conclude that positions on abortion are generally deeply ingrained prejudices and reason is pitifully inadequate to alter them. One holds on to one's opinions with religious tenacity. I will try once more, in vain perhaps, to restate my argument.

Vivek writes:

Atanu sets up a false choice. Infact aborting the female foetuses and the terrible fate are two sides of the same coin. You can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other. Does Atanu truly believe that aborting the female foetus will improve the lot of the girl child?

Technically, the two sides of a coin present a dichotomous choice. Therefore if one claims that two matters are akin to two sides of a coin, one is admitting that there is a dichotomy and therefore a choice is implied: you can either have a head or a tail, but not both. Therefore, one cannot accuse me of setting up a false choice while admitting that the issues are two sides of a coin.

Now about the matter of whether aborting the female foetus will improve the lot of the girl child? Clearly, if the neglected girl child is the one which is the result of the completion of an unwanted pregnancy, then the aborting of the foetus will not result of the girl child and therefore it is an improvement in that there will not be a girl child to be abused and neglected and sold to Jat farmers and so on.

My gripe with policy of banning selective abortion is this: it does nothing to address any of the causes of problem; it merely attempts to deal with the effect. It is dangerous to attempt to supress the effect. The effect is a signal that there is an underlying fundamental set of causes and that we must do something about that if we don't want the effect. By suppressing the effect (the signal), it is possible that we lose our drive to fix the cause. If I take a headache pill and supress the effect, I will have less of an incentive to inquire into the cause. Perhaps the headache is a signal of a growing tumor. Suppressing the headache could make me ignore the cause and hasten my demise.

Emerging Economies

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Claus and Edward's "Baker's Dozen"

Claus Vistesen and Edward Hugh are proud and happy to announce that they are now working as "featured analysts" with a new Boston-based start-up - Emerginvest.

Claus and Edward have used a new, updated, methodology in order to identify a group of 13 emerging economies which we consider are going to outperform both the rest of the emerging economy group and the OECD economies in terms of a number of key performance indicators over the 2008 - 2020 horizon.

Through our association with Emerginvest we hope to develop performance indicators which will confirm both the relevance and validity of the selection procedure adopted.

We would like to point out that we have absolutely no financial connection whatsoever with Emerginvest - although we do heartily endorse what they are trying to do.

In particular we see the move by the investment community towards emerging markets as one of the most effective and direct ways to address those issues of inter-country wealth and income imbalances which have plagued our planet for so long now - namely by getting the money from the rich who have it to the poor who need it.

Sending investment to emerging economies is also a way of addressing the underlying imbalances which exist between the relatively older populations of the developed economies who increasingly need to save, and the relatively younger emerging economies who can benefit from the investment of those savings in their countries. So in a way you can both ensure the future of your own pension and help attack poverty at one and the same time. This type of possibility is normally known in economics as "win-win".

The oldest known source and most probable origin for the expression "baker's dozen" dates to the 13th century in one of the earliest English statutes, instituted during the reign of Henry III (r. 1216-1272), called the Assize of Bread and Ale. Bakers who were found to have shortchanged customers could be liable to severe punishment. To guard against the punishment of losing a hand to an axe, a baker would give 13 for the price of 12, to be certain of not being known as a cheat. Specifically, the practice of baking 13 items for an intended dozen was to prevent "short measure", on the basis that one of the 13 could be lost, eaten, burnt or ruined in some way, leaving the baker with the original dozen.

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About Claus

Claus Vistesen is a 23 year old macroeconomist who is on the point of finishing his MSc in Applied Economics and Finance from the Copenhagen Business School. His primary research interests are international finance and international macroeconomics. Claus is especially interested in how the changing structure of global and national demographics impacts on local macroeconomic performance. Moreover - and as the wonk he ultimately is - he also takes a considerable interest issues and methodologies associated with econometrics, and this is an interest he intends to develop in his postgraduate research.

About Edward

Edward 'the bonobo' is a Catalan macroeconomist and economic demographer of British extraction, now based in Barcelona. By inclination he is a macroeconomist, but his deep-seated obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of contemporary demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

He is currently working on a book with the provisional working title "Population, the Ultimate Non-renewable Resource".